To have fun the spooky season, NASA has released a bone-chilling photo of a creepy “skull” that appears to glower up toward space from the guts of an unlimited volcanic pit in Chad.
The uncanny image was captured Feb. 12 by an unnamed astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS), because the spacecraft passed above the Tibesti Massif — a mountain range that stretches across the middle of the Sahara Desert through Chad and Libya. The image was released on Oct. 31 by NASA’s Earth Observatory.
The skull-shaped feature is situated on the ground of Trou au Natron, also often called Doon Orei — a 3,300-foot-wide (1,000 meters) volcanic caldera, or crater, that was left behind by a large volcanic eruption tons of of hundreds of years ago. The geological indentation is situated simply to the south of Tarso Toussidé, a good larger volcanic feature that’s home to a potentially energetic stratovolcano. (Trou au Natron translates to “natron hole” in French, while Doon Orei means “big hole” in Teda.)
The white color of the skull’s mouth, nose and left cheek is given off by natron, a naturally occurring salty mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. The eyes and nose hole areas are cinder cones — steep conical hills built around volcanic vents that tower above the remainder of the caldera floor. The darker area to the left of the face is the shadow forged by the tall rim of the crater, which helps give the skull its distinctive shape.
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Trou au Natron is barren and lifeless today, but experts imagine it was a thriving glacial lake until around 14,000 years ago.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, researchers discovered fossils of sea snails and plankton beneath the pit’s natron-covered floor, in keeping with Earth Observatory. And in 2015, a follow-up expedition found algal fossils that date back 120,000 years.
Despite being a minimum of as old because the fossils throughout the dried-up lake, Trou au Natron is definitely one among the youngest volcanic features within the Tibesti Massif, in keeping with Earth Observatory. The encircling volcanoes are likely much older.
This just isn’t the primary time that a skull-shaped feature has been spotted from space. In 2016, a weather satellite image of Hurricane Matthew — a category 5 tropical storm that killed greater than 600 people across the Caribbean — captured the swirling vortex cosplaying as a sinister shadowy face with a shiny red eye and distinct teeth because it made landfall in Haiti.